Having just paid £34 for my virtual ticket to the 2014 WFTDA Division 1 Playoffs, I have some thoughts.

1) £34 is not a lot of money when you consider that this it covers 5 full weekends of roller derby (even I’ll only be watching about 30% of those games).

2) If I had not been able to compete and get paid for a website in the last week, I would not have been able to afford to watch the Playoffs and Championships of my sport. That sucks.

3) The WFTDA claims to be constantly striving to further the interests of roller derby as a sport, but I fail to see how putting the highest level of play behind a fucking paywall helps further the sport and bring in new fans. I’ve seen people make comments that the UFC does it, but roller derby is not the UFC. I have friends and family who are what I would call ‘casual’ fans of roller derby, people who would love to watch it on TV or online, but can’t because they can’t afford it, because they care but not enough to shell out $12 for a weekend of games that are (for many people) inconveniently timed (bloody time zones). And what about the friends I have who see me talking about the Playoffs on facebook or Twitter? They might be future fans themselves, if I could point them to a video feed and talk them through the first fewslightly bewildering minutes. But I can’t, so they go off and forget about it’l, and that pisses me off.

The WFTDA seems to care so much more about money and “professionalism” than they do about genuinely growing the sport, to the point that they are ruining relationships with businesses like Derby News Network, along with a lot of non-member leagues and skaters. Take their livestreams- DNN did better, for free. DNN made sure to keep fans updated when there were problems with feeds or sound or when a server blew up. In the UK Derby Duck Productions is new but is already head and shoulders above wftda.tv in terms of quality and customer service.

Basically, I’ve been getting sick of the way that the WFTDA does things for a while now, but I don’t have any solutions (obviously). I’m just ill, and grumpy, and fancy having a rant/discussion about roller derby governing bodies 🙂

One thing I learnt (from driving lessons, weirdly) is don’t look at what’s right in front of you – look for where you want to be. You still see what’s going on around you, but you be focused on getting out of the pack rather than getting around individual blockers.